


The Innocence of Wolves

by GatewayGirl



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Dark, Marauders' Era, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-21
Updated: 2006-08-21
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:45:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GatewayGirl/pseuds/GatewayGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. The Prank goes wrong, Severus Snape dies, and the Marauders dispose of the evidence and get away with it -- and after that, what can't you do? While Remus falls for Sirius, the Marauders become the Free-Blood Guards, working to destroy Voldemort's servants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to atropos_lee for Britpicking and other comments.
> 
> Warning: This is much darker than most of my stories.

_"That's_ Snivellus?"

My stomach, never at its best after a change, churned as I eyed the lumpy remains, dark with dried blood, that were spread out on the floor of the Shrieking Shack. They were scarcely identifiable as a person, never mind an individual, and there wasn't enough of them, which didn't bear thinking about.

"Sorry," Sirius said anxiously. "I didn't think he'd actually _do _it -- not the whole tunnel. Never thought he'd have the bollocks for it."

"Never mind the _stupidity_to follow explicit instructions from Sirius," James put in. "Whatever he might have been, he usually wasn't gullible."

_Wasn't_ was the operative word there. I couldn't help sounding slightly hysterical.

"But what are we going to _do? _I'll be executed! I'll be _expelled! _And Sirius will go to prison, and --"

"Only if we get caught." Sirius sounded inappropriately smug. I watched him exchange a knowing glance with James.

"We've been discussing it," James said steadily. "We _can not_ let anyone find out."

"If he disappears, so what?" Peter contributed. "No one likes him -- I don't think even his mum and dad do; he never gets any letters. And he's always going off by himself and doing creepy stuff -- so he went too far, right?"

"How?" I forced myself to look away from the body -- no, meat -- on the floor. "How are we going to do it? I'm due in the Hospital Wing in a few hours."

"Five," Sirius said helpfully. "And we hadn't quite got to _how. _Transfigure him, James suggested."

"Transfigurations can be broken."

"I was thinking transfigure him into something edible," James elaborated, smiling slightly. "Can't restore what doesn't exist."

"You expect me...." I couldn't say it -- not without what I'd already swallowed coming up.

"Oh, I was thinking Sirius should do the honors, since he got us into this mess." James drew his wand with a flourish. "What's your pleasure, mate? Raspberry chocolate trifle?"

James, I reflected, could be a real bastard. Now Sirius looked as green as I felt.

"I _won't_ eat Snivellus."

James sniggered. Like an echo, Peter did the same. Sirius snarled.

"And partially, that's because Peter would eventually not be able to resist saying that I had, just for a weak dirty joke."

"Too bad." James was standing now. "Your mess -- you clean it up."

Sirius squared his shoulders and took a deep breath. I knew he was going to give in to James -- he always did when James got that look. "Rabbit, then. Just let me be Padfoot, so I don't have to think -- no, wait!" His eyes lit. I could tell that he'd just hit on a way out. "I have a better idea! It doesn't have to be any of us. Turn what's left into birdseed, and we can spread it along the edge of the forest on our way back. If any bits survive, well, he'll just have been traced to the Forbidden Forest, right?"

"Brilliant!" James perked up noticeably at the suggestion. I didn't feel any better.

"Except I ate quite a bit of him already, apparently." I swallowed a threatening rise of bile and tried not to think about that too much. It felt unfair that only I should have to live with that, but I couldn't form any more words.

Sirius, as he sporadically did, understood. "Hell." His jaw pronounced with tension, he scooped a lump of flesh off the floor, swallowed hard, and pointed his wand at it. It turned into a chunk of chocolate cake. His eyes locked on me, he took a bite of it and chewed. I could have kissed him.

After swallowing, he turned to James. "Taste?"

With an expression of revulsion, James gulped down a bite and offered the remainder to Peter.

"Why _me?" _Peter protested. "It's not my fault at all! I didn't even hear about it until it was too late."

"Because we're all in this together," James said steadily. "Are you one of us or not?"

"It's a pact," Sirius said helpfully. "All for one and one for all, you know."

Eyes scrunched, Peter grabbed the lump of cake and downed it quickly, gagging twice and swallowing hard each time.

"All set," Sirius said grandly, as he rose from the floor. "The rest can go to the birds."

"You're the best." I couldn't keep the words from tumbling out. "All of you." I met Peter's eyes the longest, because he needed it the most, but it was Sirius that I kept close to for the walk back through the tunnel. 

  


On the whole, it was a good thing that we were all used to breaking rules and getting away with it. Even Peter managed to look appropriately surprised when Severus Snape's mysterious disappearance was announced in an emergency meeting of our house. Sirius went one better, gleefully remarking (while standing just a little too close to Professor McGonagall) that he hoped the greasy turd had got himself killed. McGonagall gave him detention, of course, but it was beautifully in character, and not at all the action of someone guilty of manslaughter. Sirius is brilliant. 

  


By June, the strange disappearance of an unpopular Slytherin boy had been largely forgotten. At the end of term, a few days before we were to head home, Sirius launched a rambling goodbye to me in a corridor. The words grew more and more awkward, while I wondered what he was trying to get at, until he interrupted himself by catching hold of my arms, stepping forward, and kissing me. Every bit of his power and charm, so oddly absent from his earlier words, poured into me with that kiss, until I felt that I must be more privileged than James. It was also damn good in its own right. A string of seventh-year girls had apparently taught Sirius a great deal about kissing.

After three days of whispers and kisses and increasingly bold touches in back corridors, we parted to go home to our families -- or in my case, what was left of my family. I wasn't surprised to receive an owl from Sirius saying that he'd run away from -- or maybe been thrown out by -- his own, and was staying with the Potters. I said in my reply that I wished I could join them. I didn't ask if Sirius ever kissed James.

In August, we met in Diagon Alley, and everything was almost normal, if you could ignore the darker turn to Sirius's humor. He still growled at Peter when the latter wanted to scout down Knockturn Alley, but he took full advantage of his seventeen years to buy restricted ingredients at the apothecary and booze at the off-license. He smelled of leather and smoke, and I stayed as close to his side as I decently could, drinking it in. After a while, I found myself eyeing Peter, and wondering if he knew how close he stayed to James. Peter smiled uncertainly into my scrutiny. I brushed past him in the Leaky Cauldron.

"The dark, wild boys and their fair shadows," I whispered. Peter nodded nervously.

  


In the safety of our dormitory, Sirius and James passed around clippings from the Daily Prophet and we mitigated our feelings of doom by spreading them out in expletive-laced conversation.

"Bloody insane," James muttered, at the end of reading about the murder of a mixed-blood family in Chester.

"Bet half of the Slytherin bastards are chomping at the bit to help, too," Sirius said darkly. "Regulus would jump at the chance."

  


Perhaps things would have settled down if the war had not come so close so soon, but my mother and sister -- all the family I had left -- were found dead two weeks later, the Dark Mark glowing in the still air above our little house. I returned from the headmaster's office too sick with grief to do more than choke out the bare facts. Peter grew wide-eyed and James grim. Sirius, usually so eager to touch in comfort, stepped back, the contempt that often hung about him turning to black rage.

"Those_ bastards."_

"Shh, Padfoot," James tried.

"I will not!" Sirius approached me then, but the hand he put on my shoulder vibrated with anger. "We'll _get _them for you Moony." The hand steadied as he knelt in front of me, where I had sat on the edge of my bed. "I swear, I'll find out who did it and get them for you, if it takes years."

I didn't care really -- it wouldn't bring my family back -- but it was the only expression of love that Sirius could make then, and that meant something.

James snorted in contempt. "It was Death Eaters. Does it matter which?"

In a flash, Sirius was on his feet, turning. "I _swear _Nott has joined up. He doesn't roll his sleeves up for anything -- have you noticed?"

"So?"

"So Regulus let slip that they have a symbol put on them, somehow. _His _followers. On the arm. He marks them, like sheep."

James sat upright. "Is he one of them?"

"Not yet." Sirius glowered. He obviously didn't expect that to last.

"Not much we can do," Peter said reasonably. "It's not like Dumbledore would believe us if we gave him a list."

Sirius looked intently towards Peter, but I don't think he was focusing. "We don't need to." His voice had that thrum of power that even through a haze of grief gave me chills. "He can't move against them, of course. _We _can."

James focused again. "What -- kill Nott?"

"And whoever else we must."

I bit my lip so hard that it hurt. They _couldn't _mean it. James, however, appeared to be thinking hard.

"We can't get caught."

"Natch."

"Your birdseed scheme, again?"

"That would do. But we can't do them all at once."

"No one can die at school." I was surprised to hear my own voice, and even more surprised that it was steady. "They'd shut it down. In _Hogwarts: A History_ \--"

"Agreed," Sirius interrupted. "Next Hogsmeade weekend?"

"The one after." I was speaking again. Wanly, I smiled at Sirius. "Migration season."

Sirius grinned back, like a beacon in a storm. "I'll take your word for it."

"We need a better name," James said quickly. "This is too important for the Marauders."

That night, all the members of the Free-Blood Guards fell asleep in the seventh-year Gryffindor boys' dormitory.

   


Nott was our first intentional kill. I say "our" in the general sense, because despite myself, I held back. Peter distracted him, and James petrified him, and Sirius, in one of his more ridiculous Muggle affectations, stabbed him repeatedly with a knife, and then cut open his shirt sleeve. He stepped back to show us the mark he had uncovered, for all the world like Padfoot displaying a dead rabbit. The design was faint, but it matched the one we'd all seen -- in photographs, anyway -- in the sky above kills. There was some relief to that -- to knowing that Sirius had been right. Still, as soon as my focus shifted out from those few inches of skin to the punctured, bloody body, I was ignominiously sick. Peter taunted me, but I could tell it was because he nearly had done so himself. I couldn't mind much anyway, because Sirius wrapped a leather-clad arm around me and told Peter to shut it.

"It's worse for Moony, you know. He's done this before, but can't remember it."

I don't recall what creative thing Sirius did to the vomit, but the creative things Sirius did to me that night were worth remembering. He kept me close as we walked back, and though he joked and bragged with the others, he let me take my time about talking. When I tugged on his sleeve, he fell back with me.

"You all right, Moony?"

"Yeah." It was mostly true by then, if I didn't think too much. "Could you not use ... um, a knife?"

He ducked his head, unsuccessfully attempting to conceal a smile. "It was quite the mess, wasn't it? I didn't know how much blood people had in them."

"Six pints."

"I'm not going to ask why you know that!"

Back at the school, we didn't go to dinner with James and Peter. When Sirius told them that we had some private business to attend to, I thought it was because he had realized that I wouldn't be able to eat. I expected him to walk me back to the dormitory, but we left the staircase at the fourth floor, and he pulled me into the secret tunnel behind the mirror.

"I want to kiss you."

I still remember how hoarse his voice was, and how his body shuddered when he touched me, transmuting my fear and guilt into bare desire. In a moment, I had him backed against the rough wall, and his hands were working their way into my robes and under my shirt, digging into my back.

For the first time, we did far more than kiss. Nothing went _in _anywhere, but that didn't keep both of us from getting off more than once. We used our transfiguration skills more gently, to create a featherbed from rock and scree, and stayed there late into the night, exploring each other's bodies in the faint wandlight.

Despite that, when we returned to the dormitory, I saw a quick flash of eyes from James, whose even breaths were too pronounced for real sleep. Sirius kissed me goodnight at the edge of my bed -- not quickly and in secret, as he had done in June, nor with desperate passion as he had earlier that evening, but slowly and deliberately, as if in a message to our audience, whether it was just James, or James and Peter.

"It will be all right," he said, and it was true, because he said it.

  


We had been right about Nott being a Death Eater. You might think that would make us cocky, but we were actually more careful the second time, not less. We had chosen Avery, who boasted vaguely of having "taken care of" a "Muggle-loving whore" as our second target, but we couldn't go after him right away. There was too much of a fuss over Nott's disappearance, even though it had happened while he was off the grounds. We knew we needed to lie low, so we used the time to confirm that Avery had the Mark. Peter did the actual investigation, scouting into the Slytherin dormitories as a rat, and came back with a confirmation. I also researched spells that would kill someone more cleanly and found quite a number of them. I had to choose ones that were not classified as Dark Arts, because Sirius and James were both touchy about that, but the limitation still left me with a repertoire of usable hexes. Even some everyday hexes and charms proved to be effective. There is a cleaning charm to repel blood, for example, that has a nearly immediate fatal effect when cast on someone's head.

We killed Avery in December, on the way back from shopping in Hogsmeade. After spending the day conscious of my shortened Christmas list, I didn't feel any overpowering regret, just an emptiness as I watched my friends test out my research. I still couldn't bring myself to attack, or to touch the unchanged body, but I helped with transfiguring pieces of it into grain and seeds and then with scattering them at the edge of the forest. The snowbirds and sparrows quickly began to gather in the trees, and we all sat on a log downwind -- at least, it was downwind once James had cast a hunting charm that he'd learned from his father. I let Sirius pull me close as we watched the fallow deer emerge from the trees and nibble delicately at the gift. James and Peter were used to us touching, by then.

"Will it hurt them?"

At Peter's nervous question, I shook my head and pressed closer in to Sirius's warmth. The sun was setting. "No. It doesn't have the full nutritional value it should, but it's not a void, like eating illusory food, and it's not like eating meat, either. They may have indigestion, but that should be it."

"Trust you to look it up," Sirius said affectionately. He lit a cigarette, and James adjusted his breeze to blow a little more strongly, carrying that scent, as well as ours, away from the little deer.

"You're going to be a bear when you run out of those, you know," James needled, but Sirius just looked content.

"Not so long till the holidays."

James laughed slightly. "Did I show you what I got Lily?"

There was no mention of presents for family -- sometimes James and Peter were considerate of us that way -- but the ones for our peers were fair game. We all untied packages and compared prizes until we were certain that enough of Avery's remains had been rendered permanently unidentifiable. When we got back to the warm castle, dinner was stew, and I ate it without a twinge of queasiness. I even had afters.

"Raspberry trifle?" James offered, waving a spoon at Sirius. Sirius laughed.


	2. The Free-Blood Guards

On the first day of the Christmas holiday, before breakfast, Peter looked out of the dormitory window and gasped. Sirius shot over to join him in looking towards the Forbidden Forest.

"Bloody hell! What's the groundskeeper playing with now?"

James and I crowded into the narrow space to see what they were on about, and I cast a telescopic charm on the window.

"Yeuch," James said.

Sirius frowned. "Aren't those...?"

"Thestrals," I confirmed. "We've all seen death."

We watched for a while, all disturbingly fascinated by the sight of the skeletal winged horses wolfing down chunks of raw meat.

"You know," Sirius said, "we need to pretend we can't see them."

"What?" Peter yelped, but James nodded reassuringly at him.

"Padfoot's right. The professors will be watching, I bet, to see if anyone reacts to them. They'll be looking for witnesses, if not actual suspects. That might be what he's called them out for."

That wasn't it, of course. Fortunately, we ate quickly and toured the castle windows on the third floor until we caught sight of the thestrals again, by which time, they were harnessed to the carriages. When we walked outside, we weren't shocked. Still, Peter couldn't keep his face straight, and had to pretend to have a stomachache.

Mrs. Potter had invited me, as well as Sirius, to come home with James, and Peter, once safely on the train, whinged about how much fun we'd have together, and how it wasn't fair. James humored him, giving him sweets and telling him what lovely presents he had waiting in his trunk. It was all so childish that I nearly forgot about thestrals.

  


The Potters were very nice. If they noticed that Sirius tended to stand a bit too close to me, they ignored it. They even gave the three of us some time alone every few days while they went out visiting. It felt a little odd, sitting in their drawing room a few days after Christmas, roasting chestnuts on the fire, admiring the tree, and choosing our next kill.

"It could be Regulus," Sirius said, as if he didn't care. Still, I could feel his leg tense behind my shoulders as he waited for a response. He was taking up all of the sofa, and I was leaning back against him. James had left his regal spot in the wingback chair to tend to the chestnuts.

"Has he done it, then?" James asked.

Sirius shrugged. "Dunno. It's just a matter of time, right?"

"Won't do," I protested. "It needs to be people who are really involved and causing damage, not just mouthing off."

Sirius shot me a grateful look, but that didn't keep him from arguing. "No one at school is really doing damage -- not while they're there, anyway. They're just going to when they leave."

"Or now, maybe." James shook the covered pan emphatically.

"We managed damage at school," I pointed out. Someone had to say it.

"But no one is missing that we can't account for."

"At school. There have been kills in Hogsmeade." And one of those worried me. I suspected that the last attack on Hogsmeade residents was in retaliation for our killing of Avery.

"You know what would be brilliant?" Sirius asked dreamily.

"I suspect you're about to tell us."

"If we could get someone important. Malfoy, for example."

I twisted to look at him. "Lucius Malfoy? Head Boy when we were in second year?"

"That's the one. My cousin Narcissa is engaged to him, you know. Regulus says he's very high up in _His  
_organization."

"Didn't think you talked to Regulus."

"It's from the quill."

Before Sirius had left home, he had charmed several quills that Regulus owned to link to one of his, so whatever Regulus wrote with them was written on a parchment in our dormitory, as well. Sometimes it wrote several pages before one of us was there to move the parchment, and so made an unreadable overscribbled mess by the time we saw it, but Sirius also had complete letters that his brother had sent to their parents or to his friends.

"Do you know how bloody well protected Malfoy Manor would be?"

Sirius smirked. "Against animals?"

Have I mentioned that Sirius is brilliant? He looked at me, then. "You should learn to be an animagus, too. We'll have more options if you can change at will."

  


It had taken three years for my friends to become animagi, but they had started from scratch. I had all their research and experience to draw on, and Sirius was fairly certain that I could do it in a year -- eighteen months, tops. I had my doubts. He tended to forget that we'd need to earn our livings once we left school, and I don't think he had any idea how much free time that might consume. Before then, we had N.E.W.T.s to study for.

N.E.W.T.s didn't keep the Free-Blood Guards out of action, though. Sirius and James, both naturally clever, and with all the poise of flawless arrogance, knew exactly how well they had done on their O.W.L.s, and judged (sadly correctly) that the N.E.W.T.s would be similar. They studied precisely enough to excel, and not a moment more. I wasn't that sort of intelligent, but I was experienced at studying, so I could do it efficiently. Poor Peter was going mad, stuck with the lot of us.

What was more of a problem was the atmosphere at school. Classes had no sooner started than the prefects were gathered for a special meeting. Apparently the staff had discussed the matter over the holiday, and come to some decisions. Hogsmeade weekends were not cancelled altogether, but all the third and fourth years had had their permissions for them revoked. Some older pupils were in the same state on the insistence of their parents. At the end of the meeting, McGonagall drew Lily and me aside.

"Professor Slughorn," she said, with a slight twist of her lip, "has made several rather pointed remarks about all the disappearances being children from his house. As such, he has asked me to tell my prefects to pay special attention to any suspicious activities."

I looked confused. "But no one's gone missing from school."

"Exactly what I think. Well, the poor Snape boy, of course, though knowing his predilection for trouble, I suspect he strayed out on his own, and then met with it. However, I must honor Professor Slughorn's request: please be attentive."

We both murmured our consent, and I flatter myself that we sounded equally sincere. I even relayed the message to the fifth and sixth year prefects on my side of the tower, although perhaps more lightly than the professors had intended.

  


Under the circumstances, we weren't going to rush the next job, but we did spend a bit of our time refining our list of possible targets. James said the best possible circumstances for disposal would be an unseasonably late snow, repeating our last trick with the deer, but I reminded him of the spring migration, and also of a spell I had found to turn flesh to salt, which might be dissolved. We had options.

We also had options when it came to a target. Slytherin still had one seventh-year and two sixth-years who bragged about connections to the Dark Lord. (There was also a fourth-year, but we didn't believe him.) We debated whether we should strike Goyle from the list. If we killed him, after Nott and Snape, it would leave only one Slytherin boy in our year. That seemed inadvisable, considering that the house connection was already being discussed by staff.

While that was under consideration, I started noting how Sylvester Rookwood, in Ravenclaw, had a habit of rubbing his arm where Nott and Avery had borne the mark. I began to watch for his reactions to announcements of attacks, and to Goyle's blatantly offensive comments about Muggle-born pupils.

"Rookwood," I said. "Put him at the top of the list."

"Rookwood?"

"In Ravenclaw?"

"Exactly. We can't do another Slytherin -- it's too suspicious. And I'm nearly certain he's one of Voldemort's servants."

Peter, with a harassed expression, responded to a prod from James by saying he would check when he had time. Chastised, I pulled out my books and began studying. Sirius gave me an appraising look. When I glared in reply, he answered with a smile, rose, clapped James on the back, and murmured something about firewhisky. They were out long into the night.

  


The year after Sirius left his family, I spent a lot of time worrying about his future. As I saw it, he had expensive tastes and no work ethic whatsoever. He didn't consider his family to have had any money; compared to the Potters, they did not. Compared to mine, they were impressively well off, even if they did tend to waste it all on trappings of greater wealth. As their heir, he had a buffer zone; without that, I wasn't sure what he would do. I tried to scold him into studying and get him to think about careers, but he just laughed and told me not to worry.

"If it gets too bad, I can always eat rabbits. Something will come up."

He didn't ask what I was going to do; everyone knew I had no prospects, no matter how many N.E.W.T.s I took.

  


March was nearly over by the time that Peter finally reported on Rookwood. He confirmed my suspicions, but it took him a week of surveillance, and by then all of Ravenclaw tower was up in arms about rats. "Their traps won't catch me, of course," Peter said, "but I'd better stay clear of them anyway."

"That's fine," James said. "We can't do jobs too close together. So how do we take him?"

"Do we know if he's still planning to go to Hogsmeade at the weekends?"

"That's a problem," I pointed out. "A lot of Ravenclaws don't, especially in the second half of exam years."

"But...." Peter began. He stopped, as if uncertain if it was worth continuing.

Peter, oddly, was most likely to do that when he'd thought of something especially clever. "Yes?" I prodded.

"Well, if he's serving, well, You-Know-Who, won't he need to leave? When he goes to do things, I mean?"

"If he does," James argued. "He might not be expected to, during school."

"We can use the map," Sirius pointed out.

We had a map, you see, that we had made of the school, and it listed not only places, but the people moving around in them. We'd figured out a way to set alarms on it, as well, so if a particular person crossed a particular line, the map would unfold. That was only good outside class hours, of course, and we'd only done it for Snape, Filch, and McGonagall, previously, but there was no reason we couldn't put an alarm on the two entrances -- or, more importantly, exits -- to the castle, so that the map would unfold if Rookwood crossed them. All we needed was a strand of his hair. Ravenclaw Tower, unfortunately, was still in an uproar about the alleged rat infestation. It took two weeks to get the hair, and then we needed to wait.

  


"So what do we do," Sirius asked, "when we get him? Birdseed again?"

He was lying in bed -- _my _bed, which seemed rather pointed. I was pretending to ignore him, but he had the trick of posing to display his striking good looks to best advantage, and I couldn't help glancing over when he spoke.

"That or fish, I suppose," James said.

"Maybe we could feed him to the thestrals," Peter contributed, sounding excited at the prospect.

I sighed. "I think we better leave a body."

"What?"

"We're going to get him when he's sneaked off the grounds, right? If he just disappears, he'll have disappeared from school, and students are likely to be investigated officially. We don't want that."

Sirius grasped the idea immediately. "So we need there to be a body -- or at least part of one -- outside the school, so they know where he was killed."

"Exactly."

"But they could check our wands!" Peter protested. "If they have the body, and they know what spell killed him --"

"I could do it," Sirius volunteered. "As Padfoot, I mean. If he's killed by a dog, and the tracks vanish into the Forbidden forest...."

"They'll say it was a werewolf."

"So we won't do it if it's a full moon," Sirius promised. "Oh come over here, Moony, and lie down with me. You're as skittish as a rabbit with all this studying."

"Poofs," James said, without malice, as I stepped slowly towards the bed.

"I've had more of our year's girls than you have, Prongs," Sirius retorted, in equally good humor, reaching for my hand. "I just know a good thing when I see it, whatever the variations in packaging."

"You have no discernment, you mean."

Sirius pulled me down and looked over me at James. "Something like that." His mouth swept over my hair. "Or he doesn't," he whispered.

"Brooms," James said.

"Pardon?"

"I'll fly. If we're too close to school to Apparate, you can ride behind me for a bit, so they don't see your footprints change."

  


Rookwood left the school twice when the map was unmonitored. It was over a week into May, when I heard a rustling noise and looked up from my Arithmancy studies to see the parchment unfolding.

Across the room, eyes met. I watched James end at Sirius, and smile.

"Tally-ho," he said softly.

As a pack, we tumbled out of our seats, each darting this way and that for a few essentials. For my part, I snatched up some Magic Mist bombs and the map itself. In a few seconds, we were out the door, moving with a rapid stealth born of years of practice. As a prefect, with some late-night entitlements, I went openly, Peter riding in my sleeve, while James and Sirius followed under the stretched invisibility cloak. We left by the short tunnel so as to avoid the door. When we emerged by the greenhouses, Rookwood was still on the map, accompanied by another label, L. Hutchinson.

"Hutchinson?"

"Ravenclaw girl," Sirius said absently. "A bit heavy, but nice tits."

"You mean he's just courting?" Peter exclaimed, disappointed.

I shook my head, pointing at the map. "They're walking awfully fast for that."

James agreed with a quick nod. "You lot follow; I'll grab a broom and catch up. Don't attack until he's alone."

He passed the cloak to me -- it's not all that effective on a broom -- and Sirius and Peter took their animal forms. The more I thought about it, the more value I saw in learning to do that as well. I'd managed to incorporate some of the introductory exercises into my Transfiguration revision, but I was still a long way from trying the real thing. Sometimes I wanted to dump the whole idea, as well. What if my animal form was something embarrassing? It would be just my luck to end up as a sheep.

Scooping up Wormtail, I hurried after the great black dog as he broke into a trot, heading across the lawn towards the gates. He had a point, I decided. Rookwood and Hutchinson were skirting the forest, but that was probably just for cover. If Rookwood really intended to leave the grounds, his first goal would be the gate.

Indeed, when we reached the great rhododendrons that flanked the entrance, the map showed us that the two Ravenclaws had just turned in our direction. While they were still out of sight, we took cover in the deep shadows of the tree to the left. Wormtail darted away and was lost to sight. Padfoot crouched beside me, and I trailed my fingers through the thick fur of his ruff. It was soothing to touch. I thought I saw James in the sky over the wall to the north, but before moonrise, it was hard to see clearly.

"Be as careful as you can, though." The girl's voice was pitched low, but they were close. "No one knows their enemies in times like these."

"Is that a warning, Lachlanina?" Rookwood teased. His voice grew more solemn. "I know my enemies -- anyone who tries to dilute Wizard culture, whether it's a Mudblood pupil like Lindsay, or a pureblood Muggle-lover like Black major."

"They don't always announce themselves, Regan."

"You do your part, Lala, and I'll do mine. Now you'd better get back."

I tried to watch both of them at once as she trotted back towards the forest, almost immediately vanishing into the deeper black around the rhododendron, and he paused for a moment, looking after her, and then turned and strode efficiently towards the gate.

He was just short of that opening -- and the chance of Apparating -- when a huge black form surged up from my side, barreled out from the shadows, and bore him down. Although they made no sound other than the thump of two bodies hitting the soft spring mud, there was a cry from the direction of the forest. It was quickly followed by running footsteps.

"Regan! Regan, wait!"

I drew my wand just as the dog raise his dripping jaws, but before either of us could move, we heard a shout of "Here!" from behind her.

The voice was one only us four would recognize -- how Peter sounded after a particular potion -- and the meaning was also peculiar to the Marauders -- _run,_ it meant. That may seem counter-intuitive, but it was a signal that we had devised as second years. You see, if you shout "run!" anyone who is pursuing you, or even watching you, looks about for the people being warned. If you shout "here!" they look at you. Peter used it the most frequently, not because he was especially self-sacrificing, but because he could dodge behind a shrub and vanish.

It worked. The girl turned to look, and Padfoot darted into the blackness next to the wall. Even a very large black dog can hide quite well by starlight. I hit her with a Confundus charm, gathered the cloak around me, and then began to quietly work my way back from the scene.

I had just reached the cover of the trees when I heard the wailing from the gate.

Padfoot was sticky with blood. He rinsed off in the brook on the way back to Gryffindor tower, and I dried him off with a charm. Sirius was good enough at that sort of thing for practicalities, but not for show. When I was finished with him, you couldn't tell he had ever been wet.

The walk back to Gryffindor tower was quiet, and as soon as we got there, Sirius went to take a real shower. The rest of us got ready for bed and then sat in the dormitory, trying to think of what to say. Sirius returning was like a light turning on. He shook his head, splattering droplets of water on James and my Charms essay, and then pulled out some firewhisky from under his bed.

"Drinks all round, I think! And toasts." He'd already dumped the water out of the glass at my bedside and replaced it with a generous dram; now he passed the bottle on to James.

"Toasts," James commented, amused, as he cast a charm to steam my water out of the carpet. Peter was pouring now.

"Toasts, yes -- a toast to Peter for quick thinking!" He raised his glass, and we all followed, James with an overly dignified "hear, hear!" Peter flushed with pleasure. "And Moony as well, for his speed with a well-chosen hex."

"Do I get anything for pulling you out of there?" James asked.

"Hell," I said, over a laughing reply from Sirius.

"What?"

"We didn't do anything about footprints going _out."_

Everyone fell silent. James got to his feet.

"Well, that doesn't need all of us to fix. I'll grab a broom, again, and fly out there."

"Not Wind charms," I warned. "That's as obvious as the footprints."

He saluted me with the firewhiskey and downed it. "Of course not. No, the whole area is going to be trampled by a deer, who will come from -- and return to -- the Forbidden Forest."

"Thanks, James," Sirius said warmly.

"No problem. Save me a drink or two, yeah?"

He slipped out, and we were quiet again, although it wasn't quite as strained.

"I hope my Confundus was enough."

"Should have been. She didn't get a good look at me."

"I had her distracted at first."

"Yes, you did, Peter. That was brilliant."

Sirius and I looked at each other. I think it was supposed to be about Peter's need for reassurance, but honestly, I was thinking more about stripping Sirius down to his still-damp skin. Sirius gave me a wink and topped up Peter's glass. We crept away as soon as he nodded off.

  


Despite the stress-relieving nature of activities with Sirius, I hardly slept for worrying about what the girl would remember or have turned out to have discovered. It turned out that we were free and clear. My Confundus charm had caused her to turn her glimpse of Padfoot, crouching and bloody-jowled, into a sighting of a panther, and she hadn't managed to investigate in the dark, with the torn body right there. By the time Dumbledore and others of the staff had made it out to the site, James had done his job well. Furthermore, from what was left of Padfoot's tracks, they thought he had come from outside the gate, rather than beside it. Once again, we were safe.

We definitely were not doing anything else that year, however. All Hogsmeade trips were cancelled, and strict controls were placed on leaving the building.

"Which is ridiculous, really," James declared, waving an arm towards the window. "I mean, Rookwood wasn't supposed to be out there, now, was he?"

He was interrupted by Sirius bursting into the room.

"Moony!"

I would have thought something was wrong, but he sounded delighted.

"Hi?"

"My Uncle Alphard died! Well, not that I'm happy about _that, _really, but he left me almost all his money, and...." His excited words skittered to a halt. For a long moment, he just looked at me. "Um ... live with me? I mean, if you help me find a place, I'd -- You'd be welcome."

He had turned uncharacteristically red, and the last words were formal. I tried to absorb everything that would mean, from a roof over my head to not missing Sirius, to Sirius treating me like a boyfriend, rather than as a diversion.

"Sure," I managed. My voice squeaked slightly. James cleared his throat.

"I think I'll head down to the library," he announced. "Coming, Peter?"

  


We were not as kind to James about his budding relationship. A few days later, when we were coming in from Quidditch practice (that is, James and Sirius had been at Quidditch practice, and I had studied in the stands rather than the library, because the weather was too beautiful to waste, and Peter had been pretending to study in the stands, to show off that he was that close to _James Potter_) -- anyway, walking back, we met up with Lily Evans and a friend of hers coming up from the greenhouses.

"'Lo James," she said casually. "Want to work on that Potions project after dinner?

I looked at the others. Sirius and Peter were both looking almost angrily at James. I have to admit that James _had _told us that Lily was softening on him. However, since James periodically claimed she was, and it had never been true before, none of us had paid it any attention. They began chatting together about something. She even sat with us during dinner, nattering away at James about the project they had in mind, and N.E.W.T.s, and how good it was of Slughorn to give them extra brewing time.

Back in our dormitory, Sirius pushed James down to sit on his bed and glared at him.

"Lily!" he said accusingly. "When did that start?"

"I told you she was softening!" James retorted. He was too amused to be really angry.

"No offense, mate, but you've been saying that since the fifth year."

"Ah, but this year, we haven't had Snivellus around, and I've caused _so _much less trouble. She appreciates how I've matured." He raised his head with haughty dignity, and then ruined it with a smirk. "She's quite sweet, really."

"And if she ever finds out what trouble you've actually caused, we're all doomed," I said sharply.

"Then she better not find out, right?"

"You can't count on that," Sirius interjected.

I sighed. "He's right, James. Lily is Head Girl -- the top of our class. If you want to study with her or snog her, that's fine, but don't let it get anywhere near full-time. She'll figure it out. If she even sees your animagus form, she'll figure it out -- the deer tracks around our last job were noted."

"I'll be careful," James said, but his jaw was set in its most stubborn line. "But I will have her."

"Have her as much as you want." Sirius stepped back, his head still high with anger. "But you _don't _keep her."


	3. Freedom and Strife

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Content gets slightly more disturbing near the end of this chapter.

The rest of the year focused around N.E.W.T.s. There was one spot of trouble after the Charms practical, when Goyle called Lily a Mudblood and told her she wouldn't last a month away from school and her doting professors.

"We're taking him out," James said angrily.

It had been an hour since the actual slur, but no one needed to ask for clarification. We had just arrived back at the dormitory, so it was really the first opportunity for James to say anything.

"No," I said.

"Why not? The last week of school -- we won't be here anymore!"

"And if he gets killed on the grounds, and no one gets killed next year, _then _what?" Emboldened by fear, I advanced furiously on James. He tensed back in surprise. "_Then _they know it was a seventh year! There are rules outside school you know. They don't have Filch, but they have _Aurors. _You _have _heard of them, right? Four convictions for murder will get you worse than a week's detention."

James looked ready to respond furiously, but Sirius flopped theatrically down on his mattress, with such force that his bedcurtains waved in the outward push of air. All eyes went naturally to him.

"We'll do it," he declared, "but _after _we leave school. No harm in waiting, James -- and he's the one that won't last a month."

  


Actually, it took a little more than that. Sirius had arranged to rent a room in the Leaky Cauldron for the two weeks after school -- the pub was quite full of classmates who had had the same idea -- and from there, we went househunting, often spending all day on it. We thought it took a long time, though in retrospect, we were lucky to find a place as quickly as we did. Ten days after leaving school, we -- well, Sirius -- bought a cozy little house in Hunterdale, a Wizarding settlement in the Mendip Hills. It was a long way from both London and the Potter estate, but there were plenty of places in Diagon Alley -- including the Leaky Cauldron, of course -- that didn't restrict the use of their grates to customers. I had no doubt that we would have more than our share of pints at the pub, by way of passing through. The purchase used less than half of Sirius's inheritance, and mine, although much smaller, was not negligible, so we found ourselves well set up, for the short-term. Sirius declared that he would look for a job in the autumn, when the summer glut was over, and I pretended to believe him. We spent a week alternately cleaning vigorously and lounging about on the mattress on the floor that was serving us as a bed. It wasn't until the fourth week that, having invited Peter and James over for a housewarming dinner, we finally began to plot Goyle's demise.

  


James, at least, had been thinking about it. Of course, he was back on his parents' estate, with homecooked meals and a house elf to pick up his clothes, so he had plenty of time. He showed up with a sheaf of parchment, which with a tap of his wand and a whisper of "confusion to our enemies," turned into notes.

"Here," he said, handing them out. "Goyle is back with his parents, and that place is dangerously heavily warded. However, he works in Wales, at a remote farm that breeds Welsh Greens for steak and potion components...."

It was a lot less complicated than Rookwood. Goyle -- in the form of a fat ram -- fed a Welsh Green the next week, and the Free-Blood Guards were back in action.

  


"Parkinson, then, leaving his night at the club. How about this week?" It was almost a year later. Sirius and I still didn't have jobs -- deliberately, on his part. By my calculation, we could handle another five years of that, if he didn't buy anything else like the motorbike. That gave us time for other things, such as monitoring possible Death Eater targets. We usually didn't have the force to counter-attack, but I'd found a very good tracking spell, and we could frequently take the bastards out during the following week. You would have thought we'd have made some dent in the forces of the rising Dark Lord, but there seemed to be a limitless supply of people willing to be his servants. At least more of them were now inexperienced and poorly protected.

James put down his wine and shook his head. "Can't, I'm afraid. I have a date with Lily."

Sirius looked sharply at him. "You're still seeing her?"

"Ease off, Padfoot. I'm keeping it casual, just like you said."

I didn't believe it. James doesn't know what "casual" means. Sirius could see a girl for a year and not lose anything to her -- James couldn't. James shifted uneasily.

"Are you getting anywhere on the animagus transformation, Moony?"

Sirius went along with the subject change. "He's ready. He just keeps putting it off."

At which point, I had to try, because Peter was getting that gleam in his eye, and I knew I would be taunted merciless until I did it. I stood up.

"Good time," Sirius said. "Easier after a glass or two."

I hesitated.

"He means it," James put in. "Not drunk, really, but about like you are now. You could Apparate, right?"

I could. I nodded.

"More to the point, you could turn a log into a roman couch." Sirius had a way of working too much information into any comment. Peter made a contrived gagging noise. "So go ahead."

Apparently, I needn't have worried about being a sheep. Perhaps the wolf was worked too deep in my self-image for me to be anything else. I didn't know what I was at first, of course, just that I had had sharp teeth and long fur and that my head was roughly at crotch-level to my mate.

"Oh, pretty!" James exclaimed.

"I knew he'd be sweet." Sirius laughed and changed.

I wasn't thinking entirely normally, but I did understand. I hated when they treated me like a girl. Yes, I wasn't as macho as either of _them, _but that didn't mean I needed to take being called _pretty._ Confronted with Padfoot, who was a good head taller than my new form, I bared my teeth, but he just whined ingratiatingly, wagged his tail, and moved into sniff me.

It was too much. With a sharp yelp, I twisted around and mounted him. It wasn't sex, really -- just pure dominance. (To my chagrin, I later discovered that real wolves don't use mounting that way, so I couldn't blame my actions on unaccustomed biology. Fortunately, none of the others ever bothered to research the matter.) I bit his thick ruff, pumped against him twice, and then dropped back, growling. The dog crouched in front of me, and licked up at my mouth.

"Oh, so it's like _that, _is it?"

"Hey," said a second voice. "Remus. Remus, change back. You need to speak to me."

I didn't think I really did need to speak. I focused on the dog, again, but he turned into a man.

"Yes, Remus," he said intently. "You need to talk. You need to be a man, now. Come on, Remus."

"Oh, I don't know," said another voice. "I think I could stand to watch you two fuck, like that."

I changed back, glowering, and Peter laughed. "Hard to remember, isn't it?" he said, and I couldn't hold it against him. James and Sirius might have been hours coaxing me.

"God, you were gorgeous," Sirius said.

"What was I?"

"A wolf." James threw himself back on the sofa.

"Small though. And white. White the way a real wolf would never be -- as white as a show dog that's washed every Friday."

I supposed that made sense. My fur had never had a chance to get dirty. Sirius stood up.

"Shall we go to the Jolly Shepherdess for a pint? I think we should celebrate!"

We postponed the job for a week and didn't let the delay ruin our evening, but Sirius and I couldn't forget the problem of Lily. Our suspicions had been raised. We kept an eye on James, and found that he was seeing Lily at least once a week. The resulting fights were as fierce as they were soft, and they led to James being such a bear that Lily told him to go away and grow up. For the moment, disaster was averted.

  


In '79, a group of masked men broke the protections on the Potter estate, killed Mrs. Potter as she was mulching her roses for the winter, caught Mr. Potter as he charged out of the house to either avenge or help her, and then hit the house with Incendiary curses. That, at least, was the scenario reconstructed by the Aurors. James arrived home from a pint at the Wand and Cup to find the Twickenleys, a wizarding family from up the hill, helping to put out the fire, and Aurors firing off investigative charms around his parents' covered bodies.

We hadn't had tracing charms on the Potter estate. We probably should have, but we all, including James, tended to think of it as being the home of his mother and father, and they were moderate purebloods -- not supporters of Voldemort by any means, but not doing much to oppose him either. The Aurors theorized that James had been the real target of the attack. He had attended a fundraising ball the previous week, making the society pages of the Daily Prophet with a radiant Lily Evans on his arm.

"Nothing against Muggleborn witches," the leader of the investigation commented gruffly, "but these days, with You-Know-Who as powerful as he is, you need to be more circumspect. Have your lady friend come to my office tomorrow morning, and I'll send one of my people out to strengthen the protections on her home. If that was the motive, she's a target as well."

  


In the aftermath of the funeral, we ended up back at the Potter's estate. The manor house still wasn't safe to enter, much less use, but the summer house at the end of the garden was intact, and other mourners had brought food and drink. James had more of the latter than perhaps he should have, considering how little he had eaten in the past three days, and he began to rant about vengeance.

Lily, who had been rubbing comforting circles on his back, pulled away.

"You listen to me, James Potter!" she chided, an almost maternal crack of authority in her voice. "You are _not _to do any such thing! I won't have you joining some renegade vigilante group and running about with a lot of murderous thugs who are no better than Death Eaters themselves."

"What do you know about it?" James sneered. "Bloody _girl. _I've --"

"I met your parents! They wouldn't have wanted --"

Sirius, out of desperation, sent Calming charms at both of them, just as I cast a Sobering charm on James. He sank back in a wrought iron chair, his face in his hands.

"Please -- I can't talk about this now, Lily. I'm sorry."

Her stance softened, and Sirius, all charm and reassurance, ushered her off. I heard him saying something about letting James get it off his chest, and she was starting to nod as he escorted her from the room.

James cried.

  


"You need to break up with Lily."

It was a week later, and James was sinking into despondency. Sirius had him over to our -- well, his -- house, and had sat him down for a talking to, firewhiskey included.

"I can't."

"Of course you can! She's more trouble than she's worth." Sirius leaned forward. "Listen, James -- she _will _work it out. And there's no way to get her to go along. I think even if we involved her, she wouldn't."

"I know that, but ..."

"Then you know that you need to leave her."

James let a noisy breath out through his teeth. "She thinks she's pregnant."

Sirius wasn't pleased. He made a brief sound of sympathy, but his eyes never wavered. "James? My chosen brother?" He waited until James was fully focused on him, and he spoke very slowly and deliberately. "You give her a generous allowance, and you leave her anyway."

"But the baby --"

"Will get no good out of being associated with you. If we're ever caught, anyone close to us is dead." Sirius refilled their glasses. "Take your girls night by night, James, or find one who'll join us. Not Lily."

  


In the end, James did as Sirius insisted, and the next two years passed much like the previous two. In retrospect, the times that the four of us gathered to socialize between the jobs became steadily fewer, but it took me a long time to notice that. I had Sirius, and I was happy, really. If our breakfast table conversation sometimes involved hexes and poisons and ways past wards, that didn't make much of a difference. They were just tasks that we discussed as a couple, like some couples discuss what to plant in the garden.

In the summer of '81, Sirius picked up a pair of new friends. They were twins, named Fabian and Gideon, and they seemed to belong to a more reputable counter-Dark group, but didn't mind sharing intelligence. Not that they necessarily knew that they were. At any rate, plied with drinks and attention, they'd gladly give Sirius name after name of the people unofficially known to be behind particular attacks, and when some of those people were found dead, they'd raise a glass to the anonymous killer. It was useful.

That source brought us back to the matter of Malfoy -- now married to Sirius's cousin, much to his disgust. According to Fabian and Gideon, Malfoy was just as high up in the Dark Lord's ranks as the letters from Regulus had intimated, with his money furthering his master's goals by day, and his wand supporting them by night. For the first time in months, we had unanimous support for a target.

  


Getting in was easier than it should have been -- a surprising number of wards against intruders have no effect on animals, even animagi. By the time we were getting to things we needed to dismantle, we were within a stone's throw of the manor.

Our work, of course, raised alarms somewhere, but we had expected that. As soon as the barriers dropped, James and Sirius split to either side, while I continued straight on towards the door, and Peter resumed his animagus form. When the master of the house came out, wand raised, he was hit by hexes from both sides. The plan was that the first would weaken his Shielding charm -- if he managed to cast one -- and the second would take him down. It usually worked, but not with Malfoy. Instead of a Shielding charm, he cast a spell that propelled him backwards, into the house.

I was the closest. I immediately shifted form and shot off in pursuit, preventing him from closing the door. The others followed, Sirius baying like a hellhound, and Prongs striking sparks from the marble floors.

We brought him to bay in the ballroom. I think he'd hoped to get through to the smaller room beyond, but Prongs cut him off. I changed back just as he turned, wand already sweeping through the air.

"Stupefy!"

Peter had him. I stepped forward, just a hex came angling downward from the side and sent Padfoot flying. I whipped around. A statuesque blond woman was standing on the stairs. Instantly, I sent off a Stumbling hex that brought her tumbling down the long sweeping staircase towards the marble floor of the ballroom. She had a young child in her arms, and he screamed as she pulled him down, and then let go of him on the first bounce. On the second, he was suddenly floating, and then James was running past me. He pulled the child close. Not unwisely, it kicked and flailed, but it couldn't have been all that much over a year old, and James could easily hold it.

I looked around. The lady had cracked open her head, and probably broken her neck, besides. It was a messy death, but it would do. Someone, probably Peter, had slit our target's throat, so that was good. The problem was this child, which James looked determined to protect. I'd never known James to show any affection to infants before. As I watched him walk carefully down the staircase, I wondered what on earth had got into him. He was holding the thing and cooing.

"There, love, there. It will be all right."

I didn't think it would be. Both of the child's parents were dead, and though he was too young to understand that, he was old enough to understand that his mother wasn't holding him, and that he had been hurt, and he was probably still animal enough to know that the sharp scent of blood in the air was bad. Watching James gaze at him with a mixture of longing and sorrow, I suddenly understood. Lily's child -- his child that he had never met -- would be about this age.

Sirius was there, apparently not significantly injured, and speaking quietly to James. "Sorry, mate. We need to kill it."

"No!" James pulled the child closer and drew his wand. "No. It's just a baby."

"A baby that saw all of us. The Aurors can get at his memories you know." Sirius took on a coaxing tone. "Come on, James. He'll be miserable, anyway."

"Better than dead!" James raised his head. "I'll Obliviate him, and we can leave him here. This place is sure to have a house elf or four -- he'll be found before he starves."

It wouldn't work. I knew it wouldn't. Obliviation isn't reliable on infants before the age of speech; it's something about the organization of the brain. It was clear, though, that James was adamant about not killing him.

"Fine," I said, sending Sirius a warning look. "Make it good."

  


While James Obliviated the baby, I hastily transfigured a cot for him. Sirius, meanwhile, had started to search through drawers in the adjoining room.

"Sirius!" I called.

"I'm finding things. There's this portkey --"

_"Elves,_ Sirius -- let's go!" Leaving the baby crying in the cot, we headed out to the lawn, to Apparate home. At least, that was what we were supposed to do, and I suppose the others did do. I apparated across the garden, into the shadow of a wall, and waited for them all to be gone. When the coast was clear, I jogged back inside.

The baby was really lovely. He had fallen asleep in the few short minutes I had been gone, and he was a sweet little thing, with pale blond hair and round cheeks. I cast an Anesthetic Charm on him, picked him up, and snapped his neck.

"Sorry."

I did feel rather awful about it, which took me by surprise. I didn't usually mind killing people -- of course, the people I killed where usually killers themselves. I didn't throw up, at least. I took the body and laid it by the lady, and then I apparated out. I expected that Sirius knew what I was doing as soon as I didn't show up at home, but we needed to discuss it anyway. And a drink wouldn't hurt.

  


We were woken by James thundering up the stairs to our bedroom.

"SIRIUS!" He was standing in the doorway, his face crimson with rage, dragging at the stained carpet with one foot, like Prongs about to charge. In his hand was the morning paper. I pushed the covers out of my way.

"Don't yell at him, James. I did it."

"You!"

I held his eyes as I got out of bed and pulled on last night's trousers in an attempt to feel less vulnerable. Unfortunately, I could still smell perfume and baby on them. "It needed to be done."

"He was a _baby!"_

"A Death Eater's baby," Sirius said, joining me in standing. He didn't seem to mind being naked. "Why wait fifteen years?"

"More to the point," I interrupted, "Obliviation is unreliable on infants."

James stepped back, shaking his head. "You _maniacs,"_ he said, his voice unsteady. "When did you become such heartless bastards? How did I not notice?" He sounded on the edge of hysteria. Sirius stepped forward and caught his arm.

"Listen, James," he ordered. "That boy got a good look at all of us, and unless you wanted to turn his mind to mush, there would still be a good chance that an Auror with the right training could pull those images out. You can risk yourself ... but _not _the rest of us."

The color drained from James's face, even as the lines of it hardened. For a moment, he took in small gulps of air, working at words. "I want out," he said flatly. Now that he had managed to speak, the words were hard and deliberate. "I'm out of this, and I'm finished with you, understood? I'll keep your secrets, but I'm not doing this anymore. I'm _done." _

With a wrench, he pulled free of Sirius's hold and apparated out before we could even begin to argue with him. In the wake of his departure, Sirius stood in the center of the room, his hands clenched into fists, in absolute silence. I went and used the toilet; Sirius joined me in the shower. Before I could even wet the soap, he turned me towards the wall and started a rough fuck. I didn't mind; I felt about the same. We didn't speak until after breakfast.


	4. A Personal Target

For two weeks, it looked like James might really manage to maintain his distance. After a week of silence, Sirius sent him a letter. Camilla, my owl, returned with the missive still sealed. I composed a second one, saying we accepted his decision and would still like to be friends. After waiting another week, I sent it. That one too came back unread. Peter reported that James had closed his floo.

Things might have gone on that way for a while, but a few days after that unsuccessful letter, I started to head home via the Leaky Cauldron, and spotted a familiar head of messy hair bent over a pint at a table in the corner. I bought a pint of my own and headed over, casting a subtle privacy spell before slipping quietly into the free seat across from him.

"Are you all right?"

James jerked to alertness and spent a moment staring. "Oh," he said. "You."

"Sorry," I answered. "Not your favorite person right now, I know. I miss you, though."

"You used to be the nice one." He was on the edge of drunk. "Don't understand how you could _do _it."

I had thought about this, fortunately, in the wake of his dismay. I knew I wouldn't get many chances to reconnect with him.

"I was never the nice one," I said gently. "I was the not-nasty one."

He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "And the difference, Socrates?"

That was good. He was amused, at least. "You and Sirius take everything personally. You looked at that child, and you saw the son you gave up, and needed to protect him. Sirius looked at him and saw a Death Eater's spawn -- practically vermin. I just saw a stranger, too young to even separate 'me' from 'them,' but old enough to be used against us."

His eyes closed. "Don't you care?"

I bit my lip, using the pain to collect my composure against the betrayal in his voice. "Of course I do. But I care the most for my friends. A stranger is nothing if weighed against you and Peter and Sirius."

His eyes opened again and he looked down at his beer. "I can't do it -- not after that."

That was what I had been waiting for. I reached across the table, forcing my hand to stop just short of his arm. "That's fine. We accept that. We'll even lie to you, if you need to not know what's going on. Just don't cut us out, James. We miss you."

He shifted his arm forward, tacit permission to touch him, which I took.

"Lily won't talk to me. I've tried telling her that things are different now, but I don't know what to say, and she doesn't believe me."

I grinned. "Tell her you've stopped letting Sirius run your life."

He stared at me for a moment. "That sounds like we were ... I don't know ... lovers?"

"So? Maybe that will make her curious enough to ask."

He laughed slightly and toasted me with his beer. "Still think you've gone round the twist."

"Probably. But if I hadn't, I wouldn't have Sirius, now, would I?"

  


I was just getting back to the table, new drinks in hand, when the grate flared and Sirius stepped out of it. He looked around, saw me, and then halfway to me, saw James. He nearly ran the rest of the way.

"Prongs!"

James glanced down, but Sirius caught at his arm, speaking quickly. "James, look -- I'm _not _the Dark Lord, and you're perfectly welcome to resign -- you can do that. But please don't -- it _has _to mean something!"

There was an embarrassed silence. Slowly, James looked up. "Yeah," he said. "Missed you too."

Sirius yanked over a chair from the next table, straddled it, and took a swallow of my beer.

"How've you been?" 

  


With James, of course, we lost Peter. That was inconvenient, but not insurmountable. Yes, it had been simple to have an animagus rat to levitate through upper windows, but Sirius knew any number of unlocking charms and wove them, with luck charms, into various devices. Over the next month, he and I were very active, perhaps to prove we could be. We occasionally met James, although he did not visit us anymore.

One night, Sirius came home from an evening with the Prewitt twins and woke me with an insistent kiss.

"Hm?" I struggled for awareness. I had fallen asleep on the couch, and Sirius was kissing me.... "Someone get you worked up?"

"Fabian and Gideon had news."

"Oh?" I was almost awake now. New targets didn't usually make Sirius aggressively amorous, but by now he had straddled my lap and was sucking at my ear.

"Mm. Yeah, they caught a bit of conversation. They know who killed the Potters."

I shoved him off. "WHAT?"

He grinned unrepentantly at me. "The Lestranges, at least the brothers and maybe even my cousin who's married to one of them. I'll happily kill them all, to be sure. Shall we invite James?"

I shook my head. "No. He's trying to get Lily back -- let him."

"But he'd want to...."

"And we're _not _going to tempt him. We'll tell him afterwards." I stood up. "Did you do any research?"

Sirius laughed. "In the past twenty minutes? No. We can start tomorrow."

"All right. Let's get to bed."

He yanked me back towards him and nipped at my neck. "Bed is good. Just don't expect to sleep."

  


We discovered that Rabastan lived alone, so we decided to target him first, and then try to take out Rodolphus and Bellatrix, the cousin, in the same night. Using a strategy that had worked for us before, we planned to wait for a night when all of them were likely to have been out late, and attack soon after. We didn't know how they kept Saturdays, but Halloween was coming up, and You-Know-Who tended to use his servants to full effect on that night. We started over to Rabastan's place when we thought it was late enough. The job was textbook. We left his body still lying in his bed and headed out to take on the couple.

Getting in seemed easy, but it must have been a trap. When we opened the door, we were hit by simultaneous disarming hexes. Before I could recover, a hand had grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me close, and a wand was pressed painfully into my neck.

"Well, well, what have we here?" The woman holding me looked very like Sirius in hair and build, but her features were coarser, and hard with pleased cruelty. She licked her lips as she looked from me to Sirius. "Could that be my bloodtraitor cousin? I don't recall inviting you, vermin."

Her face twisted as she spat out the last word. I tried to stay limp. Sirius wasn't moving, I'm sure because of the threat to me.

"Watch this one, love." She shoved me at Rodolphus, a large, dull-looking man. I expect that whatever these two did, she planned. Rodolphus didn't feel the need to grab me -- he just kept his wand trained on my chest. I hoped that Sirius wouldn't hesitate to change form and attack. Having come here on our own suddenly seemed the height of folly.

_"Crucio!" _

Sirius screamed and fell. I'd read about the Cruciatus curse, of course, including first-hand accounts, but it was one thing to know about it, and another to see Sirius, with his ridiculously high pain tolerance and not inconsiderable machismo, falling to the floor in spasms of agony.

I tore my attention away, looking back at my guard -- and discovered that he, also, was intently watching Sirius writhe. In an instant, I was a wolf, and launching myself at the woman's back.

I crashed into her, and she went sprawling. Her wand shot out of her grip and skittered across the floor, and I raked at her with my claws, and then seized her shoulder in my teeth, pulling her between me and the shouting man. It would be difficult for him to target me with the two of us so close and moving, but I wasn't willing to be any more vulnerable than necessary. As soon as I was oriented, I pushed her forward again, changed quickly, and grabbed my wand and Sirius's wand from beside her. I was putting up a Shielding charm even as I turned, which no doubt saved my life. The hex from Rodolphus sizzled around the edges of it and burnt a stray lock of her hair.

We fought back and forth, hexes and charms, while I desperately hoped Sirius would recover before Bellatrix reached her wand. She was trailing blood as she pulled herself across the floor to it. I decided direct attacks against Rodolphus wouldn't do it -- the man's defenses were too good.

_"Reducto!"_ He had a Shielding charm between us, but I hadn't aimed at him. He didn't have time to adjust his guard before the ceiling above him exploded and rained down in chunks. As it covered him in plaster, he bellowed in rage, the sound going higher with pain as sections of wooden beams followed. Beneath that cacophony, to my immense relief, I heard a familiar _"Stupefy!"_

After disarming the man, or possibly his corpse, I slowly straightened and turned.

Bellatrix was gaping, not insensate. A glance at Sirius explained the imprecision -- he had cast with her wand. Slowly, like an old man on a cold morning, he rose to his feet. His eyes locked on hers, he took the wand and snapped it over his knee.

"Here." I passed him his own. He looked better as soon as he was holding it. With a deliberate, vicious stalk, he walked straight up to Bellatrix, first casting a Binding hex on her and then bringing her fully alert.

"You filth! You _dog!"_

She hadn't been expecting Sirius to laugh -- at least not that way, with real amusement. He muted her voice, so that she could speak, but not loudly.

"Cousin." She was wearing a knife at her side; he drew it and cut her sleeve. We were not surprised to see the Dark Lord's Mark there. "Now, now," he chided. "Don't you know that Blacks are not servants?

She spat, hitting him in the face. "To serve my lord is an honor the likes of which you will never know. You are a disgrace to the family, with your half-blood friends, and your Muggle --"

He talked over her. "You are going to die. First, though, I want you to know why. Remus, make sure the other one is dead, will you?"

After moving a few of the larger chunks of debris, I found that Rodolphus was still twitching, so I cast a Freezing charm on his lungs. "Done," I called back.

Bellatrix was furious, but I didn't care. I kept lookout and listened while Sirius told her about the Potters, about how much better they were than his parents, about how he loved their son like a brother.

"They're dead now," she taunted. "Dead and molding and full of worms, and you can't bring them back!" She cackled madly, and he slapped her.

"Poor, ickle Sirius. Does he miss his second mummy? Does --"

Quite suddenly, she gasped and spasmed. Wary of traps, I moved forward, but she was twisting in obvious pain.

"Master, master! Please, master, my lord, my --"

Sirius grabbed her wrist and pulled her arm out. The Mark had flared to a dirty red, but even as we watched, it faded, first to brown and then to grey, until it was a barely perceptible shape in white, like an old scar.

"Weird."

I nodded, although I thought _weird_ didn't half cover it. Bellatrix began to thrash again, wild to break free of her bonds. "My master! I need to go to him -- I need to find him! Master --"

"Has no use for your corpse," Sirius interrupted harshly. "Now," he said, "the _dog _is going to kill you."

And he did.

We lingered there -- I'm not sure why. Oh, I know what we did -- Sirius wanted to look for information, and then he wanted to have sex -- but it wasn't the sort of foolishness we usually indulged in. Time around a job was time that you could get caught. Still, I fucked him with indulgent leisure across his cousin's bed, and he screamed with delight, as he earlier had with pain. It was the best remedy for the Cruciatus that I had at hand.

Finally, in the first light of dawn, Sirius let out a yawn, and I suggested that it might be time for our own bed.

  


As our living room swerved into focus around us, it was clear that something was wrong. The place was swarming with people -- Aurors! Several were clustered around James, wands drawn, and Peter was standing to the side, wringing his hands.

"HERE!" James shouted, over the first syllable of a Disarming charm, and Peter yelled "NO!"

Predictably, the Aurors' attention flicked briefly to them, and Sirius Apparated us right back out. Looking over his shoulder, I had half a breath in which to see James become a great stag, his head already lowering. He had no intention of escaping.

(I didn't tell Sirius that until much later -- he would have gone straight back to die by James's side, I'm sure.)

The Apparation brought us to our hideaway -- our private one, fortunately, because there were no doubt Aurors at the old bolthole for the Free-Blood Guards. From there, we used the portkey that Sirius had lifted from Malfoy Manor. Charms hadn't told us where it went, only that it was a long way and over the water. It landed us in a nice stocked cave, but we couldn't be certain our travel wasn't recorded somewhere, so we raided the cache for two blankets, the spare wand, and some water flasks, and headed out to find a refuge of our own choosing. We spent the light of day in a hay-shed, sharing the sleep of the dog tired, and woke refreshed and undiscovered.

  


Despite the risk, Sirius insisted on tracking down a wizarding paper before we moved on. He did it with proper stealth, fortunately, because even in France -- that was where we'd ended up -- the business made the front of the _International_ section, below the fold, including photographs: a candid shot of Peter, distraught, and an old portrait photo of James.

He had died in that charge. Perhaps the worse shock was that Peter had betrayed us in return for leniency, apparently hoping to leave James out of it. That was a bit absurd, for while we certainly would not have mentioned James if he hadn't come up, I doubt he would have stayed silent through our trial. Perhaps Peter was hoping that we would die being taken, as James did. The tenor of the article was that an Auror reverting to lethal force was understandable when she had just seen her partner gored to death inches from her, and I suspect that a charging dog, or wolf, would have met much the same fate.

James, according to the article, had walked into the stakeout, waving a news clipping of the latest Death Eater murder -- Lily Evans -- and shouting that we were going to get those bastards. It was somewhat incriminating, and the Aurors had been distracted by the business of taking him into custody when we arrived. The photo above the fold was Lily with the baby -- James's baby -- not because of the association with James, but because in the intervening day, it had come out that she had been killed, not by Death Eaters, but by You-Know-Who himself, and while she had died, the child had survived, reputedly destroying You-Know-Who in the backlash. The hold of the Dark Lord on Britain was broken, not by James and us, but by this wisp of a son whom he'd never met.

  


That's the story, to the best of my memory. In stark black and white, it looks worse than it felt at the time. My next task is to distill the salient points out into letters -- one for Dumbledore, to whom I feel I owe a confession, and one for the child, when he is old enough. The problem is, I am having trouble imagining what age that will be. I expect it would be good for him, when he is young, to know that his father did not leave them for want of caring, but because of it. Still, I do not want to inure an innocent child to the idea of killing people. Perhaps I should write two letters, one for when he is six or seven, and one for ten years on. I expect Gringotts would take them and move them to his vault in the years that I specified.

At any rate, that must wait for later. Sirius is back from that horrible bar he frequents, and has called up the question of would I do 'our specialty' for money? I'm not sure, but whatever my answer, I suspect I'm in for a ride.  



End file.
